Eridanus: The River Constellation

Mazzoleni presents the first solo exhibition in Turin by American artist, Melissa McGill.

“This exhibition connects the stars and the waterways and traces the arc of my entire artistic oeuvre, inviting exploration of perspective, mapping, water storytelling, constellations and connections between past, present and future. In studying and intervening with historical maps (some are found and some are from the State Archives of Turin) I engage with water and natural organic and homemade materials in the same way I have engaged in collaborative interventions in the public realm“, the artist says.

Mazzoleni, Torino
MELISSA MCGILL. ERIDANUS: THE RIVER CONSTELLATION

Mazzoleni, Torino 30 October 2024 – 8 February 2025

Private View: Wednesday 30 October 2024, 6pm – 10pm

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Guided by waterways and the cosmos for over 25 years, Melissa McGill explores mysterious and extraordinary natural places and perspectives, offering new ways to navigate some of the urgent and relevant environmental topics of our challenging times. Each of her projects takes the form of a constellation – of individuals, organizations and elements – coming together to create new illuminated stories in reciprocity with nature.

The exhibition title, Eridanus: The River Constellation, references one of the largest constellations in the southern celestial hemisphere, represented as a river. It is one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy. Extending farthest in the sky from north to south, it later gave its Latin name to the Po River.

The artist opened a deep dialogue with historical maps, specifically through collaboration with the State Archives of Turin. As archives, libraries, and collections are defined as much by what they include as by what they leave out, McGill reflects on what is recorded in these maps, what is expressed in the lines marking territories, calculations, names applied, and how nature and water are represented. What perspectives are represented? What is missing?

Through McGill’s intervention, the technical and scientific representation of the Po River represented in archival maps, are combined with the artist’s unique combination of organic materials, connecting us once again with the environment these maps delineate. Organic indigo, kaolin clay, copper oxide, homemade soy milk, vinegar and water, give a new voice to the historical representations depicted in Eridano (Number 1) (2024), carrying both the water’s creative expression and the reflections of the stars of the Eridanus Constellation.

“My aim is to illuminate our interconnectedness with reciprocity with nature and explore new ways of navigating forward with nature’s wisdom as our guide.”

After Red Regatta, McGill, alarmed by the precarious state of our waterways, followed the Venetian Lagoon’s waters back to their source. The Po River, Italy’s longest river, is an ancient and enduring life force that flows into the Adriatic Sea, just south of the Venetian Lagoon. When friends and collaborators in Italy shared news of the Po River’s neglected and dying state due to climate change and exploitation, McGill began to envision how to support the Po itself through a creative telling of its story. In July 2023 and in Summer 2024, she travelled to the Po’s source and delta, its beginning and its end. These deeply moving and engaging trips inspired a water storytelling project titled Lifeline, where the Po River is the guiding ancestral narrator.

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Included in the exhibition are two sculptural works made of inky blown black glass, the cosmic Here and Now (2004) and Between the Two, ll (2016), an installation mapping negative spaces between Bernini’s sculpture of Apollo and Daphne, which enter into a dialogue of reflections with everything around them.

“In the exhibition there is an interconnectedness amongst the works, with many intuitive, poetic and narrative levels of resonance. Between the Two II (2016) is a suspended glass sculpture that delineates the negative spaces between the figures in Bernini’s extraordinary Apollo and Daphne (1622-1625), where the pursuing god reaches for Daphne as she transforms into a laurel tree to escape him. We can find a resonance with the Po here also through the story of Phaeton asking to drive the chariot of his father Helios the sun (who is linked to Apollo). Phaeton is struck down by Zeus and falls into the river Eridanus — or into the Po in many classical tellings. His sisters, the Heliades, turned into poplar trees on the banks of the river as they mourned for him and their tears fell in the water becoming drops of amber.”

Kathryn Weir Eridanus: the River Constellation. A Conversation with Melissa McGill, excerpt from the exhibition cataloge, 2024

The exhibition will be accompanied by a book of the same name, Eridanus: The River Constellation. The publication, designed by the New York-based studio Waterhouse Cifuentes, includes an essay by Kathryn Weir dedicated to the artist’s work, along with an in-depth conversation about McGill’s artistic and research practice. It also features an essay by Stefano Benedetto, Director of the State Archive of Turin, which links the preservation of historical archives with the contemporaneity of McGill’s research. The artist’s narrative voice tells, in the first person, the genesis, emotions, and behind-the-scenes process of the ongoing research dedicated to water and the cosmos, presented to the public for the first time at the exhibition in Turin.

Eridanus: The River Constellation

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